FSFE Newsletter - May 2012

54 DFD events and FSFE handcuffed EU Commissioner

As you can read and see in this years
report, Document Freedom Day 2012 was celebrated with 54 events in 23
countries and in 19 world languages. It was the biggest DFD in history with
over 26 talks, over 6 awards for Open Standards, lots of other events and the
press coverage counted almost one hundred articles. FSFE coordinated
between all the different events, awarded several organisation, and in Germany
mailed over 370 and called over 170 politicians about Open
Standards. Several of these politicians, from a range of political
parties, did activities
for DFD. FSFE also send out 100 information
packages including handcuffs to suggested people including several
politicians, CEOs, and the Pope. EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes used our
handcuffs in a public speech, which resulted in a lot of
additional press coverage including the front page of the Guardian
Online. FSFE is eager to hear more reports of what recipients of the
package did with the handcuffs.

May 4th: Day against DRM. Is it their "good right" to restrict us?

Last week your editor gave an
interview about Digital Restriction Management (DRM) (German). It was
about the questions of what DRM is, why companies introduce DRM, why you have to
treat your customer as an enemy to make DRM work, and which other possibilities
exist. When discussing Free Software, DRM, Antifeatures and other topics you might
often hear from intelligent critical people that it is "the good right" of
producers to control their products. Why do so many people think so? Would they
also accept those restrictions in "the analogue world"? Is it the good right of a
publisher to prohibit that you can read a book out loud, lend it friends, or sell
it? Several times your editor abused books: last week he used three of them to
fix his broken sofa. Would it be acceptable that the publisher or the author
can forbid such use cases? Do more people accept such restrictions with
software and data, and if so, why? Has the industry with the term "Digital
Rights Management" successfully implied that they have this right, and a lot of
people accept this?

Free Software topic in the French Presidential elections

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that 15 percent of the State's IT
budget is spent on Free Software programming, support, and maintenance. In
future this budget will increase by 30 percent per year. He said this policy is
"strategic for the development of the French IT sector". His challenger François
Hollande even said this policy has to be intensified.

It is important to raise awareness for Free Software with your politicians,
and sending them questions is a good start. FSFE is gathering all such effort
in our "Ask Your
Candidate" campaign. FSFE would like to thank April for their good work in France, and
encourages other Free Software supporters in Europe to get in contact with
their politicians. If you have questions how to start such activities in
your country, region, or municipality, please get in contact with us. By next month
you will also have the political parties' replies to the questions from FSFE
for two federal state elections in Germany.

Vendor lock-in costing Helsinki 3.4 million Euros per year?

A report on the City of Helsinki's pilot project for the use of OpenOffice
in the public administrations leaves the public with more questions than
answers. The city trialled the Free Software productivity suite on the laptops
of council members for ten months in 2011. The suite enjoyed high approval
rates among its users. When the pilot was finished, the City produced a report
stating that the costs of migrating the entire administration to OpenOffice
would be very high. Read more about it in the press release and if you are
interested in details of the City of Helsinki's OpenOffice pilot project, and
in lessons that may be drawn from this project, we have published an analysis of the report.

Fellowship Interview: Operating Free Software based servers and
workstations in a pro-privacy web hosting and IT service company, advocating
Free Software since 2001, volunteering for the Freedroidz project, and more: this
months's interview is
Bernd Wurst.

On the 31st of March, FSFE's UK Fellows have set up a link between the Green
Light (Manchester) and Chorlton's Big Green (Leicester) festivals. There was a
Free Software talk and booth at both events, and a live link-up which brought
environmentalists together via Free Software.

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About FSFE

Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to
control technology.

Software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. It is important
that this technology empowers rather than restricts us. Free Software
gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt and share software.
These rights help support other fundamental rights like freedom of
speech, freedom of press and privacy.